


the suns rays do not burn until brought to a focus

by Skiewrites



Series: A Big Bag of LU Fics... [9]
Category: Linked Universe - Fandom, The Legend of Zelda & Related Fandoms, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Genre: Amnesia, Anxiety, Basically, Depression, Gen, Hurt, Linked Universe, Memories, Suicidal Thoughts, Wild (Linked Universe) Angst, Wild (Linked Universe)-centric, and it does not do him good, wild remembered his all of his past lives
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-26
Updated: 2020-09-26
Packaged: 2021-03-07 18:08:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26661940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skiewrites/pseuds/Skiewrites
Summary: He thought of the memories that weren't his, the fights that left him on the edge of life and death and the seemingly innocent triggers that could bring them forward (a smiling moon, a lone wolf's howl, a large body of water with a lone bird flying up, up and away from him forever and ever and ever), but he never realised how detached he was from them all until he sat down on the waterfall under the midday sun in Zora's domain and clicked through the Shiekah Slate, only to come back to himself when the moon was beginning its climb high into the sky and he could feel his face wet and eyes swollen, his body shaking with tremors as if he had just fought for his life.He wasn't eager to investigate further into his past after that.No. It wouldn't do to reminisce on things that he couldn't change.No. He had things to do. He's got a princess to save, a Calamity to beat, and an entire wasteland to investigate.Wild wakes up in the Shrine of Resurrection, and instead of having no memories, his mind is occupied by memories that shouldn't have been there in the first place.
Series: A Big Bag of LU Fics... [9]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1769746
Comments: 10
Kudos: 151





	the suns rays do not burn until brought to a focus

_I know my worth_

_I’ve paid dearly_

_For every ounce of it._

\- Alfa

* * *

When he opens his eyes, it happens slowly, like waking up from a deep dream, and he's not too sure what to do with himself.

There's someone talking to him, her words are echoing around the room, but he ignored her to assess his surroundings, to take in every potential danger that could surround him, but he finds nothing in this mysterious room, not even the woman who was supposed to be talking to him.

_Link, step forward and take the Sheikah Slate from its pedestal._

Link. He’s name is Link. He remembers that. He remembers a lot now, and his head hurts, sharp digging pains from his left ear and stabs him through his head. He puts a hand up to rub at it, but that idea dies when he feels his skin underneath his calloused fingers and realises that the texture didn’t feel like healthy skin at all (but the memory of even that goes as quickly as it came). Scar tissue, his mind supplies, though when he thinks back to how on earth he could have gotten such terrible scaring it goes blank, because for all the fights that he could remember, against monsters his mind can’t supply names to and experiences that seemed to be out of place against everything else he could remember at this point, nothing led him to the answer to what could have caused the damage to his skin, or the reason as to why he was sleeping in something akin to a coffin, though the knowledge of what a coffin even is escapes him.

_Link, focus._

There it is again, the voice.

Focus.

He could ask his questions later.

Focus.

He needed to get out of here. He wasn’t sure where he would go next though. His mind was racing with possibilities, each seeming more outlandish than the last, as while trying to go back to the ranch (was that in Ordon or in Hyrule field?) or back to the blacksmith (in Hryule Field just south of the castle, but many different castles come to mind and none of them seem like the right one) seems somewhat plausible, an image of a house on an island comes to mind, a tree house with a small drawing on it’s trunk, and a shop filled with items that he knows that isn’t his. He pictures islands in the sky and birds that would take him from one to another and he pictures people in these homes that he knows will be missing him and he has to get back to them and show them that he’s fine and his _head_ _hurts oh goddess his head-_

Focus.

He takes an unsteady step forward, but the next one is filled with confidence when he realises that his feet aren’t going to fall out from underneath him. Walking over to the only other thing of note in the room, a table like structure that tickles something in the back of his mind, he only has to stand in front of his for a couple of seconds before it activated, creating its own glowing blue light.

He doesn’t remember anything to do with this slate in the huge sea of memories he has, memories of soft music flowing around him as the world warped and the wind rushing through his hair, memories standing tall and leading armies when he felt his lowest and being oh so ever lost in a maze of caves, memories of giggling children following him around and soft red feathers underneath him as he flew through the air, memories of dreams that were not real and people who never existed and conversations with himself that should have never been possible.

This tablet never came up once, and Link finds that frightful.

_Take the Sheikah slate Link._

Link takes the slate, and he leaves to face the blinding night.

* * *

_Link is awoken rudely by a fairy, but he quickly gets ready for the day and rushes out of his treehouse after the little ball of light that insisted that he go and see the Great Deku Tree. There’s a new song in his mind, one that he’s never heard before, something akin to a lullaby, and he hums it as he goes around the village collecting enough rupees for a shield, tuning Navi’s nagging out as he did so. He doesn’t like the fairy’s attitude, but he doesn’t care. Finally, he can say that he was a proper Kokiri._

* * *

Three days come and go, and things still make no sense.

The voice that called him from before had disappeared, leaving him with no information to help him on this new journey. The memories from before he woke up didn’t seem to line up, leaving him more confused when he tried to think about it. There were not any answers to his problems in his memories, nothing around him was familiar, leaving him to walk around the walls that surrounded the area and wonder how on earth he was going to get down.

Though he wasn’t too sure what he was going to do when he eventually got down. But thinking about it was a good enough distraction from his memories.

* * *

_It takes him way too long to realise that he was looking around his room and not in fact dreaming anymore. Perhaps that’s why Zelda’s Loftwing decided to spit the letter at him with as much force as he did._

_Link had been excited for today, but there was a sense of foreboding left over from his dream that left him with dread as he got ready for the day._

* * *

Three days come and go, and he’s getting frustrated.

He’s been everywhere that is open to him now.

Well, almost everywhere. There are machines in the east that fill him with inescapable terror and approaching them caused stomach bile to rise to his throat and his mind to go completely blank. While the break from the memories was nice looking back at it, the fear that they caused and the panic they created was simply not worth the hour he would get where his mind would turn off.

There’s a mountain to the west, tall, filled with enemies and very cold. His shoes had holes in that allowed the snow in and his arms were way too exposed to try and walk through the area. He doubted that it would hold the answers as to how to get away from where he was though.

But he finds food in abundance, mushrooms everywhere, along with herbs, eggs form nests and the occasional fox he was able to shoot down with a bow he had nicked off a monster and arrows that he made himself, though the memory of learning to make them is vague and numerous. He had thought that perhaps he was so bad at making arrows that he had to be taught by several different people before he got the hang of it, but that didn’t make sense either.

None of this made any sense.

But he found an abandoned cabin in the woods that had a bed and a pot outside for cooking, so it could be a lot worse.

* * *

_It’s his birthday today, and an important one, even if the new tunic was slightly uncomfortable under the heat of the sun. the shades were starting at him like they always did, but there was something off with them, like they knew something that he didn’t._

_But he follows Aryll and ignores their glances. Today is a special day, and he wasn’t about to let some weird spirits ruin that for him._

* * *

Three days come and go, and he stumbles across an old man.

In the cabin held a book, a journal of some sort. It described a dish that allowed a person to walk in the coldest of weather for a period of time, but some of the recipe had faded away with time. It had taken some experimentation before he got it perfect, then he packed enough food and firewood for a couple of days and set about getting to the top of the mountain. He doubted that there was anything on the top, but it was either that or head to the ruins in the east.

So, he marches himself up the mountain and he stumbles across an old man.

He should probably be shocked to see an old man up here, at the top of a cold snowy mountain, in an area that seemed to be completely void of anybody, Hylian or otherwise.

But, an old man in the middle of nowhere and Link being very lost and not sure what to do?

Now, this was something that was familiar.

* * *

_Link doesn’t remember what drove him to join the army. He had countless arguments not to go, but it called to him in a way that nothing else seemed to. He remembered telling people that everything was at peace. There was no war._

_But he looked up during the training session that morning, and was taken back when his eyes met with the Princess’s._

_He remembered telling people that there was no going to be a war. He promised them that there was no war._

_So why did it feel like he was about to march to his death?_

* * *

When the old man talks of a Calamity, of the history of the Great Plateau and of his ‘missing memories’, Link couldn’t help but be confused.

Because he has memories. He has memories of fighting Ganon, Ganondorf, Vaati, Demise- And yet none of them are mentioned. He talks of the fall of the kingdom, how he and the princess and the champions, whoever they may be, failed against all hope and how the kingdom fell, which made no sense at all because Link could recall saving Hyrule eight times and more from Ganon and whoever else wanted to threaten the kingdom or her Triforce. He even remembered fighting to save Termina from the falling moon, Lorule from Yuga. He travelled the Great Sea with pirates, dreamed of Koholint Island and looked down at the clouds from Skycroft.

But nothing he knew was mentioned during his speech about how the calamity destroyed the kingdom.

He never mentioned it to the old man of course, that he seemed to have memories of things that could not have existed before the time that the Calamity happened, let alone his own lifetime, and instead kept his silence. The old man did not seem to be put off by the lack of reply from the only Hylian for miles around, he seemed to expected from him in fact.

Instead, the old man sends him on his way to towers that erupt from the ground and show him a land that he doesn’t know and then afterwards he is sent on to shrines with puzzles he’s never seen before and monks at the end who grant him spirit orbs and pray for his success at saving Hyrule, but they never say what he’s saving Hyrule from and they never give him more instruction on how to go about with this new task.

The monks remind him of redeads. Their mummified bodies did not move like the monsters did, but their voices managed to echo around Link like the screams used to

Link leaves the last of the shrines and the old man appears out of nowhere like he normally does, tells him to meet in the place that the shrines cross, but this time he leaves in a flash of green fire that Link recognises but cannot place.

It’s easy enough to see where the old man was pointing to on the map on the slate, but Link doesn’t rush off after him. He’ll be there in the morning and he wasn’t in the mood to fight stalmonsters all night. Instead he enters the shrine and lays down for the night, and hopes that he does not dream, but remembers.

* * *

_Zelda drags him to the Picori Festival, and Link lets her with a smile on his face. They have a job to do, the sword somehow feels familiar on his back despite never holding one before, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t have fun on their way._

_The Picori Festival was about celebrating, so why did it feel like he was leading Zelda to their doom?_

* * *

The Goddess statue has not always been there, that he knows for a fact.

The Temple of Time hold many different images in his mind, standing tall and proud or filled with angry spirits, and now this new image of abandonment, of loneliness, of peace, of rest. He doesn’t want to spend long here, not matter what the old man said. Even now he could hear the walls singing their tale of dangers, the foreboding song that held so much pain rang in his left ear, while his right told him that the only sound around them was silence.

But she stands tall and mighty like she always did, looking down at him with the beautiful smile that he wished was genuine. He steps closer to her, before kneeling down and placing his hands together, his eyes closing as he fell into a position that felt natural to him.

He’s not sure how other people would pray, not sure what they would ask out of the Goddess, but he finds himself praying for answers, and he frowns as he tried to push his confusion towards the Goddess, tried to show her that he would be happy to try but he needed at least a couple of answers to his questions before he knew which direction to start travelling. She has guided him before, surely she would be able to do so again?

But there is only cold silence from her, and he wonders what he had done to earn her ire.

When he next sees the old man, he is told that he has become stronger, thanks to the Goddess, and that he would need that on his journey to come.

He wishes he felt the strength that the Goddess gifted him.

* * *

_Despite the feeling in his bones when he woke up that morning, Link tried to go about his day as normally as he could. Rounding up the goats and helping out his fellow villagers were done with little active thought, and instead he wondered what about today had him on edge._

_All his life, he would wonder what would happen if he were to leave the cosy little village that he grew up in. He woke up today hoping that nothing would change, and that he would be able to stay here forever._

* * *

Link wants to leave the Great Plateau, he does, but there’s something holding him back.

It’s not the fear of falling, he has long ago gotten rid of that fear, living on an island in the sky will do that to someone. It’s not the fear of the monsters that he will bump into, for everything that the Great Plateau has thrown at him has shown that he could defeat anything with ease if he just put his mind to it. Bokoblins were stupid, moblins were slow and lizalfos were almost deaf, so with the right method he could take any one of these monsters out without needed to lift a sword or draw a bow, especially now that he had the slate with all its runes.

The guardians were harder to deal with. The first time he had seen one, something inside of him had dropped through the earth, and brought him fear like nothing he had ever known. The first one fighting one had led to a panic attack of great proportions, he had only just managed to move out of the way of the laser before it hit him, and it still sent him off his feet to roll down a hill, leaving him at the bottom to chock on his breath and grab tightly to his scarred side. He had never seen anything like them, he could not wrack his brain on how to defeat them or why they left him feeling weak, useless and terrified.

But there had been a Shrine that needed his attention just beyond them. It hadn’t taken him long to learn how to walk around them in almost silence and how to climb crumbling walls without letting a single pebble fall, least he wakes even one of the mechanical beasts up. Even afterwards, when he arrived at the shrine, he had to sit down and hold a hand to his chest to feel his breathing as he racked his brain as to why and how the machines managed to bring a fear into him that not even Ganon could do anymore.

Link wants to leave the Great Plateau, but there’s something holding him back.

He had stayed in the Temple of Time long after the poe had disappeared, a whole day really, staring at the mountains that the late king had told him to follow and he tried to ignore the castle and the Calamity that flew around it that sat in the corner of his eye, not noticing that the sun had risen and then sunk low into the sky again, and the only thing tearing him away from the site was the growl of his stomach, the reminder that he was in fact human.

But he doesn’t want to move from his perch in the temple. If he sat still for long enough he could hear the music that the bricks still sung, and even now that the building was nothing more than ruins he could still the sense of foreboding that he felt when he first entered the building and every time afterwards.

Link wants to leave the Great Plateau, but there’s something holding him back.

And yet, it’s late morning now, the second day without the old man and he’s never felt so lonely. His stomach is filled with mushrooms and apples and his head is filled with memories that conflict with each other and give him no answers to his questions. He is standing on the wall that surrounds most of the Great Plateau, his back facing the shrine where he picked up the bomb rune and the nasty mechanical beasts that could make him freeze even at the thought of them.

There’s something that wants to hold him back, something that whispers in his mind that he doesn’t need to do this all over again, that he’s owed that much at least. He’s already done so much, why do it all over again? He was too good for the world that was caught forever in the cycle to collect the triforce, he was too good to be continuously fighting the same thing over and over again. He deserved a break for once, didn’t he?

There’s something that wants him to stay, and Link uses that to convince himself to run forward and jump.

* * *

_Link tightened his grip on his uncl- his sword as he looked down at body of the only father figure he’s only known, the words of the now dead man echoing around in his head as he tried to make sense of what was going on around him._

_Sure. He’ll save the Princess. But he won’t fight in her name. It was never going to be about her, but much rather the man who’s dying breath was to teach his nephew how to use a sword._

* * *

Lady Impa, and old but impressive woman, talks to him more of his past, his present and his immediate future when he turns up at Kakariko. He says nothing about the memories to her, but when she hands him a familiar blue tunic, the embroidery clearly done by hand and done with care, he couldn’t help but hold it tightly and try and swallow down the lump in his throat that comes along with the feelings of pain and duty that it seems to carry.

He runs a hand down one of the sides, for how perfect he seems there’s a part of him that knows that isn’t true. Even though he can’t feel the difference between the old and new material he knows that it’s there, even if he can’t remember why he would know this, his scars pull at him the same ways that the machines on the great Plateau did and it leaves him nervous.

Focus.

And it came back to him, the smell as he put it over his head for the first time, the speech that the king gave to him and the other champions, the Princess’s look of indifference as she glanced at him only to look back at her father.

It leaves him feeling sick.

Focus.

“Link? Are you all right?” Link looked up at the elder woman, and he was able to finally place what about her looked so familiar, the face of the tall shaven head woman standing behind a very young Zelda coming to the front of his mind. He got a memory back, a real memory and not the huge amount of information that seemed to be attacked to his mind, a simple add-on and nothing more. It wasn’t much, it felt like it had always been there and never left, but it was enough to being a festering of doubt in the back of his mind that he knew would only be the beginning of something awful.

Focus.

“You’ve aged well,” The words fall from his lips before he can stop them, but he smiles when the woman laughs at his words instead of taking offence.

“Ha! Chivalrous as always Ser Link, but you do not need to be so polite. I know that the past one hundred years may have treated me better than most, but the years have not been kind to anyone.”

Impa talks to him more about the past that he doesn’t remember, talks to him about the future path he needs to take to save the Princess and the rest of Hyrule, but Link listens to it with only one ear as he thinks about the memory that had just played in his mind, and how it compared to everything else he had remembered up until this point. Except for the memory of Impa in her younger days, everything else he remembers is… fuzzy. Like a dream, he watches everything behind a fogged-up window, and it’s hard to notice something like that until you finally look through a clear window.

Looking back, it would make more sense if the memories were not his own but much rather someone else’s.

* * *

_He stumbles into a hidden cave when trying to run away from monsters, and he stumbles across the old man._

_There’s a look of regret on his face when he spots Link, covered in blood, dirt and clothes better described as rags at this point. The old man takes pity on Link despite his instance that he didn’t need to, and he helps the younger clean and heal himself up. For once, Link feels safe, but they both know it can’t last forever._

_The old man gives Link clothes that fit, a sword that will serve him well and advice that will never leave him._

_“It’s dangerous to go alone.”_  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so i was on vc with some people and i remembered this wip that i had from like 8 months ago??? And people there liked it so here it is for yall.
> 
> pls leave comments/kudos, they make my day


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